Richard Hernaman Allen

Former Commissioner of Customs & Excise (UK). I took early retirement to write full time (& compose music & do long distance running). I've been writing all my life and spent 30 years writing my saga novel "Through Fire". I've subsequently written two sequels. Nowadays I mainly write crime novels based in Customs & Excise, linked to major external events and the developing culture of an organisation which has since been merged/split up.

I feel that the nature of an organisation that lasted almost 100 years should be preserved, but I felt that integrating it into crime stories would make it live more for the reader than some descriptive cultural tome. There were also several events during my career and people I worked with that I wanted to write about, while preserving anonymity and disguising certain events which achieved a degree of public notoriety.

I am married, with two daughters and a grandson. I enjoy playing the violin, guitar, banjo and mandola (probably more than anyone listening to me does). I do three long distance runs a week.

The Waterguard

Detective/Crime

An honest man wouldn't be found dead with contraband diamonds. So what is Nick Storey to do with the bag of them he finds in the personal effects of a fellow Customs officer? The dead man's widow has been murdered too, and is Nick's life now in danger? Bringing in Special Branch complicates Customs & Excise other cases, but keeping them out may put Nick in breach of the law. Only WPC Johnson understands and soon she becomes the only friend Nick can trust. They must do the work of professional detectives, even as they gain evidence that the killers they are up against are professional KGB hitmen. Together, they find the diamonds are from Russia, that love is forever and that the fingers of the Cold War have reached Nick's own superiors and the last person he should have told anything at all.

The Summer of Love

Detective/Crime

1967 - "the Summer of Love" and an escalating war in Vietnam. The British want to do a deal with the US to acquire high-tech computer kit, but the US fear it will be leaked to the USSR. Nick Storey is tasked with checking the security of UK export controls. He begins to get messages containing vague threats. After he completes his initial findings, he comes home to find his flat attacked by a rocket grenade and Rosemary apparently brutally killed. To identify the killers he must break many of the rules,,including cooperating with the East German security service, going on an anti-Vietnam war demo, confronting a rogue US agent and finally laying a trap for a spy in the heart of the UK Government.